Standing Up, Sitting Down
It figures that it would take the United Electrical Workers union to try to rally the fighting spirit in America’s battered working class with a sit-down strike at a shuttered factory in Illinois. The UE have a proud history of daring and desperate fighting stands that culminated in their expulsion from the Congress of Industrial Organizations early in the Cold War for refusing to purge their ranks of Communists. That fight resulted in the loss of over a hundred thousand members and the union’s relegation to the sidelines of the labor movement. The UE that survived those terrible fights of the 40’s and 50’s remained a leaner, meaner fighting machine; a union that prized democratic rank-and-file control, labor education, the long haul struggle and the value of a symbolic fight.
The tactic of the sit-down strike was expelled from the labor movement long before the Communists who perfected it. The great wave of sit-down strikes that formed the United Autoworkers, United Steelworkers and other mass production industrial unions of the CIO-era were contemporaneous with the legal fight over the constitutionality of a new law that enshrined labor’s legal right to organize. Many employers, declaring that the National Labor Relations Act overreached Congress’ authority to regulate interstate commerce, simply decided to ignore the law and continue to fire union activists in spite of government orders to recognize and negotiate with the duly-authorized unions they chose to represent them. The workers compelled the employers to recognize them and the unions they formed by taking control of the factories until the employers relented and began negotiating for good contracts.
The Supreme Court, in some respects, merely recognized the fact of this de-facto truce when they declared the NLRA constitutional in 1938, and ordered the reinstatement of all terminated union activists. However, the court attempted a balancing act by declaring that employees terminated for engaging in illegal activities in the course of their union activity were not entitled to reinstatement. Sit-downers – trespassers and thieves, all – could thus be fired for engaging in such a strike. Having won the legal right of a union recognition process in the NLRA, therefore, most unions abandoned the sit-down strike tactic and reached a tacit understanding with management that most employers respected until they resumed open warfare with the labor movement in the late 1970’s.
While management has spent the past thirty years firing union activists and shuttering factory gates as legitimate labor relations strategies, most unions have continued to respect the earlier understanding with management, to follow the rules of the National Labor Relations Act and to get their asses kicked. The UE has changed that, but, really, what did they have to lose?
What did they have to gain, you might be asking? Well, first of all, federal law requires a company to provide at least 60 days advance notice to its workers before closing a factory. Republic Windows only provided three. Fifty-seven days’ pay is not chump change when you’re facing unemployment. The UE’s contract with Republic further called for severance of a certain number of days paid for each year of service, which would provide a badly needed cushion to those workers at a time like this. And, finally, there’s the possibility that the layoffs and factory closing may not be necessary at all, that Republic may be preparing to open a new (non-union) factory, with new (non-union) employees a few states away.
By sit-downing in the factory the union has made it impossible for Republic to sell it. Would you buy a building that was infested with 200 angry union members? By focusing their wrath and the media glare on Bank of America, the bailed-out bank that initially refused Republic Windows the loan that would have kept it afloat, the union has harnessed the public rage over a $700 billion Congressional bail-out that has protected the interests of the rich investors who created this recession while screwing the rest of us. Desperate people who might otherwise have been portrayed as greedy union members are instead valorized as aggrieved community members.
Win or lose, the United Electrical Workers have provided a shining example of the potential of resistance to cut-backs in these lean times. I hope that my own union, which is formulating a public campaign to resist disinvestment in public spending, can galvanize the public with the fights we pick and the way we fight them.
Musings From the Campaign Trail
I first noticed Barack Obama on the campaign trail for the New Hampshire primary. He annoyed the shit out of me. Granted, I was dispatched there by my union to campaign for Hillary Clinton. Neither of them would ever get my vote, but at least Hillary had a track record. You knew what you were getting with her. With Obama, a very eloquent and inspiring (to everyone but me) speaker, he was so vague that it seemed supporters projected onto him what they wanted to hear. After all, what does “Change” mean? Reagan was a change from Carter. Lenin was a change from the czar. The Good and Fruities with the jelly bean center were a change from the Good and Fruities with the licorice center.
Obama’s zombie teenage hordes of supporters really annoyed me. Were they excited about politics that looked like a Hollywood movie? It’s one thing to work like hell for his election once he was the Democratic nominee, but what made him so special in a pack of candidates who all essentially stood for the same issues? Was it that he had not been in politics long enough to disappoint yet?
Like any good organizer, I got competitive. I lustily counter-booed the Obama kids who made a fiasco out of the NH Dems’ annual dinner by booing Hillary during her speech and rushing the stage during Obama’s speech like there was a mosh pit up there or something. I’m not sure what that proved except that Obama’s campaign bought more tickets to the ball than the other candidates (and that Hillary should have followed John Edwards’ lead by boycotting the event). I cheerfully teased the inexperienced Obama canvassers and tore down every door hanger I found. (The rental agency where I returned the car must have been confused by the trunk full of Hillary lawn signs and the back seat full of crumpled Obama flyers.) Of course, Hillary won, forcing the protracted primary fight between her and Obama. She simply had the better ground operation (if I do say so myself).
After New Hampshire, I got a break from campaigning until the final two months of the general election. Up until the last minute, I expected the Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory as usual, and didn’t breath a sigh of relief until around 10:30 on Election night. In the final estimation, the Obama campaign was a modern marvel. It was an extraordinarily well-run campaign with almost no missteps or gaffes, that consistently put together a powerful ground operation, that really harnessed the power of the internet for spreading talking points, recruiting volunteers and, obviously, impressive fundraising.
The McCain campaign, on the other hand, was inept in ways that I thought were impossible in the modern political era. Like, aren’t Vice Presidential candidates supposed to undergo deep background searches? Shouldn’t a campaign worker check out “an average voter” before the candidate name checks him in a debate? In its own odd way, the McCain is an inspiration. The office politics and back-biting, the hare-brained schemes, poor communications and lousy marketing. This was a campaign staff that reminds all of us of the ridiculous offices where we have worked. Where the Obama campaign reinforces that hoary old notion that anyone can grow up to be President, the McCain campaign encourages us that truly anyone can run for President.
But this week belongs to the American people in a way that politics rarely does. If we had a real socialist movement in this country, the Obama campaign is what we would have called a real popular front-type of campaign. We were organizing across broad swaths of the public, from the center to the left, from the labor movement, to the pro-choice and civil rights movement to the peace movement to defeat the extreme reaction of the modern Republican party to elect our first black president. The spontaneous celebrations that broke out across the country and the very real and deserved pride of African-Americans is an inspiration. We are in a unique historical moment. Socialists should respect this moment, and we should respect Obama for what he currently represents, even if we suspect he will ultimately be a disappointment. We need a November 5th movement in this country to keep pressure on the President to pursue a more progressive agenda. But we should take care to be a loyal opposition for the time being.
Hopelessness We Can Believe In
In a coffee shop in western Pennsylvania the morning after Barack Obama’s muted acceptance speech in the arena, I overheard a conversation that made me wonder ‘why bother.’ “Forget about it. It’s all over,” said one excited man, the ringleader of five donut-dunking middle aged white men. He went on to advise his compatriots, “Anything you own in your own name, get it out of your name before they take it away.” The others mumbled agreement, and added their own advice about changing obscuring Social Security numbers and hiding guns. You’d think the Bolsheviks were amassing outside of Pittsburgh from the way they talked.
The conversation grew more bizarro as the topic turned to military adventurism and terrorism. “Well, we won’t see any more terror attacks, because the terrorists love him,” said a man, who presumably will look back nostalgically on the days of airplanes-as-missiles after Obama makes peace with Osama. Finally, the ringleader concluded his rant on a note of resignation. “I don’t see what you can do, though, because people are so fed up and want change. People in this country are so stupid,” said the man who unwittingly underscored his own point.
Hearing this conversation, I wonder why the Democrats even bother pandering to polling numbers and so-called “undecideds.” Wear a flag pin or don’t, hold a mass spectacle in an arena or a cozy town hall, nominate a war hero or a Weatherman terrorist – whatever you do, you’re a bunch of godless communist atheists to these yokels and millions more like them. You can’t win them over, you have to outvote them. Whoever has the better ground operation wins, period.
So, John McCain has picked an inexperienced, arch-conservative lady politician in an attempt to win over Hillary Clinton’s supporters. It’s a move that reeks of desperation and deflates one of his biggest selling points (Experience!) and, again, why bother? Who will be truly won over by this? If Kathleen Sebilius was an unnacceptable VP on the Democratic ticket because she’s “not Hillary,” how is Phyllis Schafely Jr. any more acceptable? Any Clinton supporter still refusing to support Obama is using “the woman thing” as a cover for racism. They were never going to vote for Obama, so picking this silly woman from Alaska to court these voters is a wasted gesture that wounds McCain’s campaign message. That said, the poor Old Man really had no good options. Who else did he have? The billionaire Hairdo, whom he had recently ridiculed in the primaries? The “independent” who was not-too-long-ago mocked as “Sore Loserman” by the Republican base?
Meanwhile, don’t mistake this post for enthusiasm for the Democratic ticket, comrades. While the lesser of two evils argument is more compelling this year than any other, after I am done working my union’s political program, I will quietly cast a vote for Ralph Nader. See, there really is no winning over people. You just have to outvote them.
Another Day Older and Deeper In Debt
We socialists, I hope, are not the types to revel in I-told-you-so’s, but for years we’ve been sounding the alarm that the consumer purchasing power of our fellow patriotic Americans could not be counted on to fuel the global economy. Wages for working Americans have been essentially stagnant since the 1970’s, leaving a huge amount of consumer debt to preserve the American Way of Life. But, we warned, one day we will all have to pay the piper.
That day seems to be at hand, with a mortgage crisis and bank failures making headlines. Gee whiz, the New York Times is finally giving this story the attention that it deserves in an otherwise-excellent series of articles “about the surge in consumer debt and the lenders who made it possible.” One article, which readers will likely use as a yardstick for their own financial worries, profiles a Ms. Diane McLeod who amassed over $280,000 in debt through credit cards, the home shopping network and two mortgages:
Ms. McLeod, who is 47, readily admits her money problems are largely of her own making. But as surely as it takes two to tango, she had partners in her financial demise. In recent years, those partners, including the financial giants Citigroup, Capital One and GE Capital, were collecting interest payments totaling more than 40 percent of her pretax income and thousands more in fees.
The temptations are surely hard to resist. As soon as I entered college, I received unsolicited credit card applications on a weekly basis. As soon as my first mortgage bill came due, I received my first offer to refinance the loan. But my parents’ own problems with debt when I was a kid served as a cautionary example for me, and I’ve always chafed at the idea of owing anyone or anything. For the most part, I have what economists would call “good debt.” About twenty thousand dollars in student loans, still in an in-school deferment. A single home mortgage with tiny monthly payments of under $400. I own multiple credit cards, but, save for a period of unemployment a few years back, I’ve never carried a balance (and, ironically, the time that I did rack up – ultimately pay off – credit card debt probably improved my credit rating). I have a small auto loan that I’m rapidly paying off by trebling the minimum monthly payments. And I’ve even got a modest savings account!
So, all in all, I’m doing okay. Except that the credit crunch and general economic uncertainty is effecting all of us by making everything so damn uncertain. For example, I’ve been trying to sell my apartment since last September to no avail. But the only official bid I got was an insulting low-ball offer from some 23-year-old kid with such bad credit that it would be a miracle if he got a mortgage. As a board member of my co-op, one of the last buyers that I recall approving was a unionized Long Island schoolteacher earning an impressive six-figure salary, who, nevertheless, had amassed a significant amount of consumer debt that he was diligently paying down. His credit score wasn’t very good, but he obviously earned enough money to swing the mortgage and maintenance payments and still afford annual south american vacations. So we approved him as a shareholder, on the cusp of the mortgage crisis.
I’m fairly certain that if this teacher applied for a mortgage today, he would be rejected. So, if people like that can’t get clearance to buy their own homes, who can be counted on to buy us out of our grossly inflated mortgages? No wonder this entire country feels like it’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.